Almost every state has had some form of lottery for decades. During the state lotteries’ revival, the principal argument for adoption emphasized its value as “painless revenue.” Politicians and voters both favored it over a tax increase because they would be financing the lottery through players who voluntarily spend their money rather than paying taxes that are imposed on them without their choice.
It’s a cynical message, but one that has had considerable success. It obscures how much people play the lottery, which is a substantial amount of money for many of them, and it makes the idea of winning seem more appealing. The lottery is a classic example of a piecemeal public policy, with little or no overall oversight. Once it is established, the policies and practices of a lottery are difficult to change.
Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery focuses on a rural American village in which tradition and custom are dominant. It’s a story about how people will blindly follow authority and not question authority even when it involves cruelty to others. We can see this same mindset in modern America with mass incarceration of African Americans, profiling and hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11, the mass deportation of immigrants, and so on.
The villagers in this story plan to conduct a lottery, but they are not sure what it will be for. One of them, Old Man Warner, tells the others that there used to be a saying: “Lottery in June, corn will be heavy soon.” This is an example of people following tradition with no real consideration for whether it is good or bad. Leaf Van Boven, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, has studied people’s motivation to play the lottery. He says that positive emotions generated by imagining themselves winning, and people’s tendency to minimize their responsibility for negative outcomes, are the main reasons they keep playing.